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And yet we probably don't know why they have so many copies. Maybe it's a crude method of regulating the ratio of activation on genes. If a few genes are either
by phkahler 5y ago
And yet we probably don't know why they have so many copies. Maybe it's a crude method of regulating the ratio of activation on genes. If a few genes are either on or off, and you want to have ratios other than 1:0 1:1 or 0:1, maybe independently activating N of the M copies can achieve that. Just speculating as to how multiple copies might be useful.
You can't prove that they are "extra copies" until you understand pretty much everything about them and their interactions with everything else.
- dekhn 5y agoWhile I agree in principle, it does look like in most cases, these 100X large genomes are just due to random events that haven't been selected away. Often, what you see looking at evolutionary processes at a point in time, you want to find a "reason for why it's this way", when the reason is "it was random chance". Compare deinococcus radiodurans, where there's a whole mechanism for exploiting multiple copies of the genome. Plants wiht 10X genomes don't seem to exploit that, afaict.
- andi999 5y agoIf it didn't give an advantage it shouldn't have become dominant (that all individuals of that species have that) or not?
- dekhn 5y agothat's now how evolution works. evolution tolerates enormous amounts of things that don't 'give advantage', and 'advantage' is a fairly subjective term anyway. Any number of possible events could have occurred to lead to the scenario we see. Population bottlenecks often lead to strange outcomes.
- f6v 5y agoIt’s always random chance. What’s non-random is why it’s kept in the genome. I’m no plant expert, but genome duplications could be linked to increased fitness due to amount of resulting protein product, right?